The name Bismarck sums up the political, social, economic, and intellectual development of central Europe in the second half of the 19th century and the internal and external shape that Germany then assumed. How much of all this was Bismarck's personal achievement? Was he, as many of his contemporaries believed, the key figure who made everything different? Was he the man who put the nation on the disastrously wrong course that reached its fateful culmination in 1933? Or did Bismarck in fact represent the prevailing forces of his time to a far greater degree than has often been thought? Was he successful precisely because he implemented policies for which the time was ripe - and did so in ways that were in harmony with the historical evolution of central Europe? These questions take Lothar Gall's biography beyond a "description of a life". It is designed as reading not only for students of Bismarck's life, but for all those interested in the fundamental problems of German and European history.